Recently I was lamenting the loss of Netflix old formats when I was chided or just resisting change. (Netflix new format has places where there is a slide show that runs automatically.) Newscasts are often doubly annoying because the content of the video is often a mugshot of some anchor reading something that I could read faster and I don’t read very fast. I should think it would drive some of you good readers absolutely screaming mad.
There’s a very small list of things for which I have the patience to watch a news video. Truly historical events. Extraordinary natural disasters or wonders. Firemen rescuing puppies or kittens. I think that’s about it. For the vast majority of news items, I just want to quickly scan text.
There’s a special style of speech people giving tech tutorials adopt. Every sentence ends with a ellipses. “Hi . . . My name is . . . Johnson . . . So last week . . . I think it was last week . . . I got a request from a viewer for a video on how to . . . Oh yeah, subscribe to my channel for . . . stuff . . . To begin, press the start menu . . . That’s right ooooover here, in the bottom . . . left hand . . . corner . . .”
For certain things, video’s better - when there’s, say, a crime and someone took cellphone/dashcam footage, which is embedded in the news clip, or art tutorials where you want to actually see the motions of what a person’s doing. I sometimes seek out well made video shorts. Still, for day-to-day info text is faster and more discreet (nothing like waking everyone up because of an autoplay video at 3 am).
Add me to the “hate fucking videos” list.
I never click on youtube links people share with me UNLESS they tell me what it’s about first, then I STILL don’t click on it because I’m almost always disappointed. Not to mention I have to stop everything I’m doing, turn down my music just to be disappointed, which turns into anger and then rage.
Also, this is the reason I HATE TED talks. I would rather just listen to music and read a transcript.
On the other hand, those clipped-speech videos are really unpleasant as well: the ones where they want to make it shorter, so the next phrase/sentence is overlaid onto the trailing edge of the preceding sentence. Those things make my head hurt.
Relevant Onion link (spoilered for NSFWness):
Warning: video
This is what Flashblock was made for. The instant I see the grey box that says “Right-click to play Adobe Flash Player”, I hit the back button. No autoplay and no waiting for the video and Flash player to load (and hog memory).
This here.
Add to that the simple money factor. It’s faster and cheaper to upload a video and pay no one to add relevant text and unfortunately because of that, I believe usage will increase.
That is why they slap a 30 second ad to the beginning, it makes the talking heads seem that much more relevant.
Ironically, I got mad when the Onion started making so much of their content video-only.
Totally agree, I really don’t go to The Onion at all anymore. I still read AVClub, but some of their features have been ‘upgraded’ to video-only versions and I avoid them. There’s something about this style of content that (IMO) doesn’t translate-- awkward hipsters trying to be snarky doesn’t work in video form.
I can read your words, why do I need to see your face and hear your voice as well, to know how much of a doofus you are?
We’ve had similar threads before, like What’s your opinion on video only stories on news websites? Perhaps predictably (and as LSLGuy noted), people who frequent this text-based message board tend to favor reading more than the average internet user.
Presumably they’re catering to the sort of people who, before the internet, got their news from watching the TV newscast rather than reading the newspaper.
All I could possibly add would be that if I could log into CNN and get the news in text in standard black / white / gray with no pictures, I’d be Fine. Auto start band-with hogging videos with commercials are horrible.
Clicking on a news link and getting a video makes me stabby.
Hate, hate, hate most internet news or tutorial videos. I can read, dammit!
Ideally both, the (manual start) video and transcript text with nothing added, so I have a choice.
Next one down would be both where the text is additional info about the video without repeating the info in the video.
Next one down depends on my preference at the moment, either a link to a text only site or video only side, but that link should be obvious what it contains, no guessing (and right now text is default, videos only should be noted as such).
Lastly, which is a dislike, the link takes you to the opposite of what you expect.
Video’s should be manual start, only autostart if it’s a video only link and it is obvious that is it.
I strongly prefer my news in text because I process information better when I read it over it being read to me. Even when my husband is reading something to me, I’ll usually ask to read it myself since my comprehension goes way up that way.
lynx?
Even before the Internet, printed news stories in the papers or magazines were always much more informative than TV news segments on the six-o’clock news. The TV news never amounted to much more than a few sound-bites or perhaps a few excerpts from a brief interview, and were rarely very informative. Only if the visual was something of actual interest, was a TV news segment ever worth watching.
I’ve learned to not even bother clicking on any link to any news on the PBS web site. Their stories generally consist of a video along with (for those of us who can read) a transcript of the video (usually an interview). Thus, the text is every bit as information-challenged as the video!
Somehow, we have learned to expect a text article to be more informative. When I read those transcripts of interviews, it is painfully apparent just how little information is there.